Wheeling Jesuit Quietly Cuts Swimming & Diving Programs

Division II Wheeling Jesuit University has quietly removed swimming & diving from its athletics website, following an e-mail to alumni several months ago announcing the program would be cut. Stock photo via Mike Lewis/Ola Vista Photography

Seeing their final competition of the fall semester, the Pace University women’s swimming and diving team earned a 134-76 over Saint Peter’s on Saturday afternoon. The Saint Peter’s men won their fifth straight meet with 139-75 victory over Pace.

The Indiana State women placed first with 170 points and defeated Saint Louis (102), Illinois State (74), Butler (68), Eastern Illinois (14) and Maryville (6). The Billiken men won eight events en route to the men’s title.

Division II Wheeling Jesuit University has quietly removed swimming & diving from its athletics website, following an e-mail to alumni several months ago announcing the program would be cut.

As of Wednesday night, swimming & diving no longer appeared in the list of school sports on the Wheeling Jesuit athletics website. The school hasn’t publicly announced the cut, but did respond to a SwimSwam request for comment to confirm that the sport is being discontinued. A school representative said the university will release an official statement, but as of Thursday morning, we haven’t yet received it – we’ll update the story when official word comes through. Several alumni say they received an e-mail notifying them of the cuts as well.

UPDATE: The school has released its statement on Monday. We’ve included that statement at the bottom.

The school recently hired a new athletics director, Rudy Yovich, but he doesn’t officially start in the position until September 5. (The press release announcing Yovich’s hire on August 7th says he’ll be overseeing 20 men’s and women’s sports, which wouldn’t include swimming & diving, and the school confirmed that the decision was made before Yovich’s hiring). The current interim director of athletics is Ricky Moore.

Wheeling Jesuit hired a new head coach just last fall. Former head coach Mike Meyers stepped down in November of 2015. He was replaced on an interim basis by his assistant Luis Ambrosio, and in October of 2016, the team hired local club coachJeani Humpe to take over the men’s and women’s programs.

She had less than one year with the program before it was cut from the athletic department. Wheeling Jesuit now has 10 men’s programs and 8 women’s programs, including men’s football, which was just added to the department, and will begin with an exhibition schedule in 2018-2019 and a full schedule starting in the fall of 2019. A school representative said that the cutting of swimming & diving has no connection to the addition of football to the school’s roster of sports.

Here’s the full Wheeling Jesuit statement:

The University goes through a regular process of reviewing and revising programs. In the course of this review, programs are added, altered, and eliminated. Declining enrollments in swimming meant that the program was not as successful as it once was, and we couldn’t offer a positive student experience. Half of the team are rising seniors. The team was given the option of swimming for one more year and declined.

Scary because my school hasn’t hired a coach yet and the possibility of a cut program is increasing in my head

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1 year ago

Luis Ambrosio

I am so happy to have led this program filled with talented young women and men. Not only that I was happy to see them raising that 1st place Conference Championship trophy February /2016.

I am was very disappointed to find out they didn’t have the bugdet to hire a coach for the 16/17 season. And now this.

Terrible decision! I think swimming in college is better than no swimming in College. The worst part is that higher management was never transparent with the whole situation.

@madness: they have a nice pool, great team, great academics, every single coach who visited the school was praying to be picked.

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1 year ago

Mark Dziak

I always enjoyed competing against WJU, particularly seeing the improvement of the program over the past 10 years. There were multiple swimmers in the program who had solid B-cuts and a few who were close to making NCAAs. The teams were always near the top of the conference and I always had positive interactions with their athletes. The teams competed hard, they were great young men & women, and they achieved a lot. It was announced earlier in the summer that ’17-’18 would be the last season of the program (conveniently the last year before their new football program). While there is no good time to announce a cut, it seems that with the summer announcement there may have been… Read more »

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1 year ago

About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson just can’t stay away from the pool. A competitive career of almost two decades wasn’t enough for this Minnesotan, who continues to get his daily chlorine fix. A lifelong lover of writing, Jared now combines the two passions as Senior Reporter for SwimSwam.com, covering swimming at every level.
He’s an …